Looking at the Tor documentation I discovered that the Linux/Unix installation was the ostensibly hard installation route, which I'd taken. So I figured, this will be no challenge and I immediately commenced upon installing Tor using the installer thingy and clicking OK! as fast as possible. I had already had FoxyProxy installed as well to get greater familiarity with it. After all was said and done... it didn't work.
A visit to whatismyipaddress like websites told me my ip address was... the same as it always was. I had introduced the problem of using both TorButton (which the Tor Windows site recommends) and FoxyProxy. Since FoxyProxy had more subtle configuration paramaters it was a little more difficult to determine if it was actually working.
On K5 if TOR was working you'd get a nice little "You appear to using TOR to hide your IP..." message. Which, for FoxyProxy, was great. So at first it struck me that FoxyProxy was far superior to TorButton with it's global "on/off" switch (which could be done in FP was well btw, but it allowed for more granularity).
I quickly came back into the fold and realized that although the intuitive logic of FoxyProxy was superior - why use Tor when surfing all sites? - the ability to have greater confidence that Tor was actually running, which the TorButton seemed to do - was the better logic.
So I disabled the FoxyProxy plugin and kept with the Tor-recommended plain jane setup.
This is all in FireFox by the way.
So, I quickly made two bookmarks, one to the Tor verification site at harvard.edu and one to a highly ranked whatismyip site from google and used those to verify if Tor was actually running. This was in addition to the small onion icon and green (P) now in my lower right hand windows tool bar. As well as the "Tor Enabled" text in the lower right hand of Firefox.
Another intuitive way to check if Tor was running is that everything just slowed way the fuck down. And it did!
And, of course, this could be doubly-triply checked with a visit to K5 where I'd be not allowed to "post or vote" while having Tor enabled.
So things seemed to stabilize after awhile and all looked nice and then I rebooted. Reboots are always a good test of functionality on almost any system imho. Sure, it works now. But will it survive a reboot?
No. The answer was no. It gave me a privoxy (error) message when I toggled it on and let me out ok with it off. Tor was down?!? I thought. That didn't make sense. So I find the vidalia icon and pop open its configurations and it is set to restart on boot, but tor... is not!?
So I clicked "start" for Tor and things worked fine and selected "start tor on boot" as well.
Of course using Tor involves an enormous hit to your browsing speed as mentioned above. One funny side effect, and a possible explanation for the speed-hit, is if your start page is Google, then Google will show up in the language associated with your Tor gateway. Thus, I could have an additional way of knowing I was using Tor because my Google page was in German or Danish. Packets get real tired having to move all the way from Deutschlandia to across the Atlantic.
TOR SERVER
The docs say you can run a Tor server for as little as 20KB/s. I toggled "run as server" in the config and torqued it down to the absolute minimum - 20 KB/s from the much higher value it had defaulted to. Its not much but hey, it's more than they had to begin with, right? I think one reason bittorrent works is that everyone is essentially forced to run both client and server. Whatever.
While rummaging through the Firefox 'security and privacy' plugins I came across something like four different mentions of Tor in the plugins. I have yet to try them all.
hey check this post...its from:
HTML:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/12/16/145539/25
now could someone tell me can I use Fox proxy with Vidalia???
if I can't what can I do more to make this f**kin thing faster..???
I have my own ways to make it secure but this damn thing is just so slow...can't figure out the script given as well...I mean about developing the script..
